Docstoc, the professional document repository and community, has raised $3.25 Million in Series B funding. The round was led by Rustic Canyon Partners, and brings their total funding to over $4 Million.
Docstoc serves as a repository for professional documents, featuring forms, templates, and a variety of other material. Its flash-based viewer can be embedded into other pages, allowing documents to be viewed on external sites without needing an outside reader like Acrobat or Word.
The company is also introducing a Content Partnership Program (CPP) that will allow content providers to place their own ads around their documents, and to collect any revenue they accrue. The program is free of charge, but applicants will be screened for quality. Docstoc CEO Jason Nazar says that the program is designed to improve the amount of high-quality content on the site while establishing ties with valuable partners.
Docstoc raised $750k in Series A funding last November in a round led by Scott Walchek, Brett Brewer, Matt Coffin, Robin Richards, and Crosscut Ventures. Their primary competitor is Scribd, launched March 2007, which features a similar embeddable document viewer and a large collection of content. Scribd has raised over $4 Million to date.
Document sharing on the Web via embeddable Flash players keeps getting better all the time. Earlier this month I wrote about Issuu, a Denmark-based startup that does a really good job with image-heavy documents like magazines and photography books. Today, Scribd released a vastly improved upgrade to its document viewer, which it is now calling iPaper. Scribd streams the converted PDF documents to the Flash player, and offers three different ways to view each document: in one long, scrollable window; as a book with page-turning effects, or as a slide show. Check out the book mode in the this document.
Pretty cool, but what’s the business? Scribd allows you to put contextual Google AdSense ads inside each document. Scribd will do a three-way rev share, giving most of its portion of the AdSense dollars to the document uploader. Now all those documents not already on the Web can generate some income.
Woodlands, Texas based startup Insightory is setting its goals high, with the aim to do for management knowledge what Wikipedia has done for general knowledge.
The service itself joins a growing list of document uploading sites that include Scribd and Docstoc, although the company claims that unlike these services Insightory is more targeted and heavily moderated. The content is aimed at management professionals, professors and graduate students and comes from a variety of sources including users from within the United States and elsewhere.
Insightory believes that companies need a constant supply of management knowledge and that their service can provide this; certainly it does help to get other opinions when in management so the service may find a willing audience.
The service is currently in alpha with a beta version to be launched this month and collaboration and networking tools coming in the first half of 2008. Insightory is holding a Contest for the best management-related documents uploaded to the site with prizes ranging from $100 to $3000, more details here.
I criticized Los Angeles based startup Docstoc in a post last month for pre-announcing a financing that hadn’t actually closed yet.
At the time of that post, where I suggested that they may be counting their chickens before they hatched, they said:
We are about to close another substantial round of financing from at least one, if not all, of the following investors 1) one of the co-founders of myspace 2) the angel investors in www.baidu.com and the head of mp3.com that lead the company to its 400M acquisition – at least one of these players will lead our next round, and all three parties may participate. Financing is expected to close by the end of the month.
Well, their gamble paid off. They raised a first round of financing from Scott Walchek (investor in Baidu), Brett Brewer (co-founder of MySpace parent Intermix Media) and Robin Richards, the former president of MP3.com. They won’t disclose the size of the financing to me, but they certainly closed on the investors they said they would.
The startup itself remains unlaunched for now, but I’ve seen a demo and its got potential. Like Scribd, Docstoc is a sort of YouTube for documents - users can upload just about any document type (MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Adobe Illustrator, and PDF) and display via a Flash interface on any website. But there are key differences, too. Our first post on the company is here.
Wikipedia attracted a lot of attention earlier this week when Nikola Smolenski calculated how much paper it would take to print out the English entries in Wikipedia. Smolenski calculated that as of last September, Wikipedia’s English index of informative/controversial articles would fill about 750 400 page volumes. Under the assumption of a 6MB volume, the total site would take up about 2,500 volumes (~15GB).
Today Scribd has released some numbers talking about just how big they’ve gotten as well. Since launching 6 months ago, the site has collected over 178,798 documents. That may not seem like much compared to Wikipedia’s over 5.3 million articles (source) across all languages (as of last September), but Scribd users seem more verbose. Scribd users have uploaded over 1.9 billion words, which would take up over 2,287 of Smolenski’s volumes (13.4 GB). No word on how many of those words are copyrighted.
However, Wikipedia is still obviously the pageview king, drawing over 7 billion pageviews (June) and 42.9 million (Feb) visitors per month, to Scribd’s 3.8 million uniques. Google was responsible for 24% of the traffic, and I imagine the same is true for Scribd. Wikipedia also features highly targeted and edited content to Scribd’s library of reports and rants. Although, unlike Wikipedia, Scribd is helping a lot of people catch up on Harry Potter.
Scribd has had quite a ride since launching over 6 months ago. They sustained a considerable amount of traffic after launch, and eventually went on to raise $3.5 million from Redpoint Ventures. Apparently, easily publishing documents online was not a solved problem.
Here’s a chart of the word growth of both Wikipedia and Scribd:
Note: According to statistics listed on Wikipedia, the site (all languages) has grown from 49,000 words in January 2001 to 1.7 billion words last September (the last reported point). Since the data only goes to September 2006, I extrapolated the growth (yellow) assuming the previous year’s monthly growth rate of 7.7%.
Scribd, dubbed “YouTube for documents” didn’t have the the traditional dip in traffic after its launch, and has continued to grow rapidly after raising nearly $4 million in two rounds of venture capital.
I looks like they already have competition, though. I’ve been hearing good things about new startup Docstoc, which is currently in private beta. I haven’t been able to get in and see the service, but others that have are telling me its pretty cool. The video above shows an early interface, which I grabbed from the Docstoc blog.
Scribd, dubbed the “YouTube for Documents,” was the dark horse of their Y Combinator class, but the social document site now gives its critics pause to think.
Since launching, traffic to the site scaled quickly to 75-100,000 uniques per day with a little help from popular link aggregation sites like Digg. This past month they logged 1.73 million unique visitors.
The site gets about 1,000 new documents each day and recently launched a Facebook application, which has been added by nearly 11,000 users.
The company cites an early $40,000 convertible note from Kinsey Hills Group as getting them off the ground. Today Kinsey Hills is back, investing another $210,000 alongside $3.5 million from Redpoint, with Geoffrey Yang joining the company’s board. Sources close to the deal peg the post money valuation at $17.5 million under competitive bidding, counter to earlier financing rumors.
Scribd’s most immediate plan for the money is to expand their programming team.
It looks like Y Combinator funded Scribd, a “YouTube for documents” is close to closing its first round of financing, possibly from Redpoint Ventures. Om says this is done; our sources say it will close next week. The rumored valuation of more than $10 million is very high, although the current trend is for entrepreneurs to take big money when it’s offered.
We’ve been tracking them since early last month when they launched, and Nick Gonzalez recently noted that their growth spiked immediately from launch and hasn’t slowed down much since.
We reported on the launch of Scribd, the “YouTube For Documents” a little over two weeks ago. The site drew a significant amount of traffic at launch. Unlike most startups, though, that traffic didn’t just vaporize after a day or two.
100,000 or so unique visitors come the site daily. 12,000 documents have been uploaded to 8,600 unique accounts (35% anonymous). The team says the site’s traffic has been about an even split between U.S. and non-U.S. visitors (and about half of the documents are non-English). One prolific member, Builder (Bill Allin), has 113 documents to his account. One of these, “Why Intelligent People Tend To Be Unhappy”, was so popular that it got on Digg and was mentioned on Adam Corolla’s morning show.
Scribd is an example of a small startup doing many things right. They created a naturally viral product and made it ridiculously easy to use. Posting and viewing can be done anonymously. More interesting documents get voted to the top for discovery by more users. It also seems to be very Google-friendly - many documents are working their way up in search results.
Copyright holders have been complaining, though. Twenty five DMCA take-down notices have been made against the site to date. In each case the documents were promptly taken down and things ended amicably. However, a noticeable amount of copyrighted material remains on the site, and Scribd has hired Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati (the same firm retained by YouTube) to defend them on copyright matters. Compared with YouTube, Scribd is better suited to deal with any ensuing complaints. The sheer volume of personally written works on people’s computers will make it easier to not depend on illegally copied works. Copyright violating text-based documents are also easier to detect than rich content.
Scribd will be releasing some new features to improve the user experience, including adjustable embed sizing, groups, and private documents.
Below is a graph showing Scribd’s internal traffic numbers since launch. These internal Scribd stats track Alexa data fairly closely.
The company a Y Combinator company founded by Trip Adler, Jared Friedman, and Tikhon Bernstam.
Scribd, a site for sharing documents, is coming out of private beta this morning with a fresh Angel investment of $300K on top of their original Y Combinator nest egg of $12,000. Scribd is most easily described as a text version of YouTube. It is a social network that lets you tag, share, and comment on uploaded documents (.doc, .pdf, .txt, .ppt, .xls, .ps, .lit).
Scribd is not just a carbon copy of YouTube. They borrowed a lot of the basic design principles, but also took advantage of the written format by including flexible file formats for download and upload along with some interesting analytics tracking. Documents can be displayed and embedded as html or the under-utilized, and faster-than-a-pdf, Flash paper format. They can be downloaded as .pdf’s, .docs, .txt, and even .mp3 files. The mp3 version is created by Scribd’s text-to-speech package (powered by Nuance) that lets you listen to the text of your document in a quivering British accent (downloadable example here). People have uploaded all sorts of documents for the private beta, like this guide to dating and seduction for dummies, or this less than legal copy of Visual C++ in 21 days. Scribd also lets you “geek out” on all the analytics generated by documents you post, such as how many votes and views your piece gets, as well as geographic location and http referrer that brought the reader there.
We’ve seen a lot of different social networks pop up around different mediums, photos, video, and even audio, but dominating a medium is no guarantee of an easy business model, as the “For Sale” sign on audio-focussed Odeo reminds us. So far social sites around the written word have dealt with books, rather than user generated, or at least user-uploaded content. Scribd lets people do something new, we just need to wait and see how far people go with it.
Docstoc, the professional document repository and community, has raised $3.25 Million in Series B funding. The round was led by Rustic Canyon Partners, and brings their total funding to over $4 Million.
